diving. He turned and pointed, yelling, “See them, they’re right there! Don’t take your eye off them.
Off what? I saw nothing but rolling waves.
“Arlis! Give her some throttle, I’m losing them. Here—” Arlis stepped aside as Tomlinson jumped to the wheel. He popped the throttles forward and the trawler lunged into the next wave.
Then I saw it: one of the six-foot-long Styrofoam noodles that had drifted slowly away from our wreck site because it was weighted with only half a cement block.
How had I missed it? We’d passed it on our port side.
Clinging to the orange buoy were Augie and Oswald, waving frantically. They were wearing black wet suits and black BC vests—Tomlinson would’ve never seen them if it weren’t for the orange marker.
“Okay, okay, I got ’em. I’ll steer.” Arlis was at the wheel again. “You boys find a boat hook. I’ll bring us alongside and you can pluck ’em out—and watch those two don’t piss all over you ’cause they’re gonna be happy as drowned dogs that we found them.”
I started to suggest to Arlis that the safest way to approach the swimmers was with our beam to the sea— get upwind and we might drift down and crush them. But he cut me short, saying, “When I want your advice on how to pick up contraband in a big sea, I’ll send a telegram. Until then, you just shut your hole and do what I say.”
Jesus. We’d left with Santiago, but it was Captain Bligh taking us home.
Tomlinson wasn’t empathetic. “Contraband?” he said, very interested. “Mind if I ask—”
“Mary-juana,” Arlis replied. “You know any other that pays as well? Back in the 1970s and ’80s, my pot- haulin’ business associates would drop bales from a plane and I’d fetch ’em out of the water. A’course, that was a hell of a lot harder than this. It was at night. Couldn’t use lights. More than once there was other boats out there, too, wantin’ to steal what was ours. Got so I could shoot pretty good in rough seas.”
“No kiddin’,” said Tomlinson, impressed.
The old man cackled and said, “Made enough money to buy Miami,” giddy enough to quote a fellow pirate. “Some of it really good shit, too.”
A ugie Heller and Trippe Oswald—the guy had a first name—were so grateful to be pulled from the water that they probably did pee down their own legs.
Oswald was bawling and Augie’s eyes were glassy—shock. Sledding up and down those waves, they’d gotten a glimpse of the abyss. There was something worse than death. It was a dark and random indifference. They’d given up. Been reduced by their own terror, and the two men couldn’t immediately resume their old facades.
Both were shivering as they peeled off their wet suits despite the warm storm wind blowing across the Gulf from Yucatan. We gave them blankets, bottled water, and sandwiches. Put them at the settee table inside the pilothouse, while Tomlinson canceled the Coast Guard search and Arlis swung the trawler around hoping to catch up with the red buoy and recover our backup dive system.
Oswald was a chatterbox nonstop talker: “Couldn’t swim another stroke, dude. My legs were like fucking cramping, and I even started praying, man. Promised God if He’d help me just this once that, no shit, I would like do anything He asked. Next thing I see is this beautiful fucking boat, almost on top of us…”
I tuned him out within a minute.
It was Oswald’s way of discharging fear. Humiliation, too. We were the assholes Augie had told not to dive his wreck. We were the dumbasses who knew nothing about maritime law. Bern Heller’s lawyers had warned us— the same lawyers, presumably, who’d figured out how to steal boats under the guise of admiralty salvage laws.
It is humiliating to be saved by an adversary. And we’d saved them.
Augie and Oswald were grateful—at first. Thanked us over and over; made weak, ingratiating jokes. They were in our debt because we’d saved their lives.
Forever didn’t last, nor did their gratitude. It began to erode when the two men made their first experimental stabs at manipulating the other guy’s recollection of what they’d just experienced. The gradual process of reinvention also required that they distance their association with witnesses they couldn’t manipulate: us.
Augie Heller was a man who was uneasy in anyone’s debt. Especially ours. He rallied quickly.
“Know what I think? I’m glad you found us, but we would’ve made it. How long were Trippe and I swimming, only an hour or so?”
I told him, “It probably seemed like an hour,” anticipating what was coming next.
“Okay, so we were taking a break when you came along. We would’ve rested for a little bit, then swam another hour. Rest, swim, rest, swim. And we had the vests on. No way we could drown. What do you think, Trippe?”
Oswald said eagerly, “You’re no quitter, Augie. No shit, when I started to lose it I thought you were gonna slap the crap out of me. And when you started to lose it, dude, no way was I gonna go off and leave you—”
“I never lost it,” Augie interrupted, an edge to his voice.
“Well…yeah, I guess now that I think about it…you didn’t really
“Neither one of us lost it. We stayed pretty cool out there.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right. We handled it pretty good.”
Augie said, “What I was asking was, how long do you think it would’ve taken us before we made it to Sanibel? Doing what we were doing: swim, then rest, then swim some more. We’d of made it around eight or nine o’clock? It would be easier at night because we could have swam toward the lights. Climb up the beach and hitch a ride. Or call Moe with his pickup truck. We’d of had a couple of hours to spare before closing time.” Augie had a nasty laugh.
I was thinking:
“How drunk you think we’re gonna get tonight, Trippe? We’ll take the Viking back to the marina, hose her down, then you and me are hitting the bars, man! We’ll get Moe, too—can you imagine how that cowboy would’ve freaked if he’d been with us today? He’d of been taking shots at the damn waves.”
Shooting at the waves? The two men exchanged looks, sharing an inside joke that I didn’t get.
I sat listening as Augie switched subjects, eager to dismantle, then rebuild, the most painful facts before he had to face his uncle.
“That shitty anchor on the Viking? How many times did I say we needed a new anchor?”
“At least once, Aug. Maybe twice. That’s the way I remember—”
“Twice, my ass. I told you umpteen times. I mentioned it coming out, but you probably didn’t hear. ‘We gotta get a decent anchor for this boat.’ That’s exactly what I said…”
I was thinking:
28
Arlis and Jeth were above on the flybridge. We’d pulled astern the forty-three-foot sportfisherman. Had been drifting along with it, presumably while they discussed the best way to put one of us aboard—dangerous in a running sea—or how to snatch the Viking’s anchor line and take her in tow. I considered going topside to find out, but decided Captain Bligh could make the decision on his own.
Tomlinson, Jeth, and I still hadn’t had a chance to talk about what we’d seen or found on the wreck and we couldn’t talk now because we didn’t want to share information with the two guys from Indian Harbor Marina. Tomlinson had found something interesting, though. Sizable, too, judging from the shape of his dive bag, which was on the stern deck. When I’d asked about it, he’d whispered, “Later. After we get rid of these two.”
For the last ten minutes, he’d been standing at the pilothouse console, using the VHF radio to keep Fort Myers Beach Coast Guard updated on our progress. Emergency distress calls are treated seriously; they require a follow-up interview before an incident report can be closed. Tomlinson had cleared his throat a couple of times before I realized he was trying to get my attention. His way of communicating privately while Augie and Oswald chattered away.
I turned. He was shirtless, the pirate’s bandanna tied around his head, wearing navy blue polyester dive
